Bob Dylan sang, “You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books/you’re very well read, it’s well known” about someone who knew something was happening but didn’t know what it was. Was that like Fitzgerald? Pretty early on he started …

It’s an intrepid novelist who goes into the house of Atreus as an adjunct of the house of fiction but that’s what Colm Tóibín has done. The man who took on the voice of Henry James in The Master has written a contemporary novel about the …

It’s funny the way even true crime has its prestige market.  Killers of the Flower Moon is a most elaborate and densely historical account of a pile of horrible murders, executed by David Grann with what is sometimes a conscious grandeur …

[TOC:ul In this story] Karl Stead is in his 80s now and for as long as anyone can remember he has been New Zealand’s leading literary critic. It was in the 1960s that he wrote The New Poetic, a book that shed light on T. S. Eliot by suggesting …

[TOC:ul In this story] Sometimes a work of trash fiction comes along with such blatant pretensions that readers are lining up to be impressed by the eloquence with which they are entertained. And so it is with Winter Traffic, this entangled …

[TOC:ul In this story] John Lahr is a theatre critic who has commanded audiences and made careers. Theatre is in his blood because he’s the son of Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz and the original Estragon on the New York stage …

[TOC:ul In this story] Michael Chabon is one of those fictional masters of the middle way who can tell a story with plenty of honeyed charm and narrative invention while going some distance to persuading the reader that he is a craftsman of language, …

[TOC:ul In this story] There’s something weird beyond belief about Sebastian Barry. He conjures up a world of very contemporary queerness (cross-dressing, gay maritals) and then casts it, with some degree of laconic historical verisimilitude, in the …

[TOC:ul In this story] Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed is the latest in a series of Shakespeare novels that Hogarth has commissioned in order to get contemporary novelists’ takes on the different stories of the Bard’s plays. We have had a retelling …